Longs Take 83% of $333M Crypto Liquidations as Bitcoin Holds $81K

Crypto derivatives traders lost $332.79 million to forced liquidations in the 24 hours to around 09:30 UTC+8 on 23 October, and long positions took $277.60 million of it, or 83.4%, per CoinGlass liquidation data. Bitcoin barely moved over the same window. It traded at $81,616.1, down 0.12%.

That combination matters. Longs were cleared out at more than five times the rate of shorts while the largest coin stayed flat, so the pressure sat in leverage on specific markets, not in a broad crash.

Ether Out-Liquidated Bitcoin

Ether carried the largest liquidation total of any asset at $58.62 million, 81.9% of it long. Ether longs lost $48.03 million and shorts $10.59 million, per CoinGlass's 24-hour breakdown.

Bitcoin followed with $52.46 million, the most long-heavy of the major coins at 87.4%. Bitcoin longs lost $45.88 million against $6.59 million for shorts. Ether also led the board in our earlier count of $483 million in futures liquidations.

Across the market, 80,154 traders were liquidated, which works out to roughly $4,150 per account on average. Binance held the largest single exchange share of the 24-hour total at 44.7%.

Tokenised Silver, Gold and SOXL Featured Heavily

The biggest single liquidation was not a crypto contract. It was a $4.34 million order on Hyperliquid's XYZ:SOXL-USD market, a tokenised version of a leveraged semiconductor fund.

Tokenised commodities also ranked high on CoinGlass's heatmap:

• Silver (XAG): $19.73 million
• Gold (XAU): $18.57 million, 98.3% long
• All other assets combined: $46.72 million, 80.0% long

Silver and gold together accounted for $38.30 million, about 11.5% of the day's total. That is close to three quarters of what Bitcoin alone produced.

Volume Fell While Open Interest Edged Up

The wider derivatives picture was quieter than the liquidation split suggests. CoinGlass recorded $182.19 billion in 24-hour derivatives volume, down 19.64%, and liquidations themselves were down 23.35% on the prior window.

Open interest, the value of outstanding derivatives contracts, rose 0.93% to $142.98 billion. Positioning leaned slightly short, with a 24-hour long/short ratio of 48.5% to 51.5%.

Higher figures that circulated earlier, $226.6 billion in volume and $431 million in liquidations alongside a Bitcoin drop of about 3%, do not match CoinGlass's rolling 24-hour window at read time. They may describe an earlier period that has since rolled out of the window. Those numbers are not confirmed here, and neither is any cause for a Bitcoin decline.

Funding rates were not checked for this snapshot, so it is not yet known whether the long-side losses came with a shift in what longs pay to hold positions. The next read on that, and on whether open interest keeps rising as volume falls, will show whether leverage is rebuilding after the long flush.